Infinite Loop —

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion: the Ars Technica review

Where Lion stumbled, Mountain Lion regroups and forges ahead.

Recommendations

For practical reasons, reviews like this must be written based largely on time spent with prerelease versions of the operating system. Early builds tend to have many egregious bugs, with the number and severity of those bugs gradually decreasing as the release date approaches. This process continues after the 10.x.0 release, eventually culminating in a version of the operating system that matches or exceeds the quality of the latest build of the previous major version.

For example, when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released, its predecessor, Leopard, was on its eighth point release (version 10.5.8) and had been on the market for almost two years. Mac OS X 10.6.0 had many more bugs than 10.5.8, but somewhere around version 10.6.6, it settled down. By the time OS X 10.7 Lion was released, Snow Leopard had been out for 22 months and was rock solid at version 10.6.8.

Apple's decision to put OS X on a yearly release schedule stands to change this progression significantly. At the time of Mountain Lion's release, the latest version of the year-old Lion was 10.7.4. That's still uncomfortably close to the "region of pain" that starts with the inevitably buggy 10.x.0 release and ends several point releases later when the worst of the bugs have been squashed.

In some ways, Mountain Lion is a refinement, enhancement, and yes, a major bug-fix for Lion. But the changes and additions are significant enough that they will inevitably come with their own set of bugs. Let's not forget Snow Leopard, which promised no new features but still brought plenty of bugs in its 10.6.0 release.

Nevertheless, my advice is the same as it has been for the last several major releases of OS X. Mountain Lion is a better OS than Lion. It's also inexpensive, and you can purchase, download, and install it the second you finish reading this review. But before you do, make sure you have a good backup of your entire system. And if you're at all concerned about a disruption to your work due to OS bugs or application incompatibilities, there's no harm in waiting a few weeks to upgrade.

As for the future, it's tempting to view Snow Leopard as the "tick" in a new Intel-style "tick-tock" release strategy for Mac OS X: radical new features in version 10.7 followed by more Snow-Leopard-style refinements in 10.8, and so on, alternating between "feature" and "refinement" releases. Apple has not even hinted that they're considering this type of plan, but I think there's a lot to recommend it.

The pattern established by the last four releases of OS X fits this prediction quite well. Leopard was followed by Snow Leopard, and now Lion is followed by Mountain Lion. This, combined with the new yearly OS X release schedule, suggests another possible strategy: skip the odd-numbered releases entirely and upgrade only to the even-numbered releases.

This still argues for upgrading to Mountain Lion, however. It also remains to be seen how viable this strategy will be for users who want to stay on the cutting edge of Mac software. In just one short year, a surprising number of Mac applications have been released that require Lion—often version 10.7.3 or later due to the latest crop of iCloud and sandbox changes included in that release.

In many ways, the aggressiveness with which Mac developers adopt new frameworks and technologies in OS X is a ringing endorsement of Apple's stewardship of the platform. But Apple must carefully balance the progress of the platform against the happiness of its users. Despite digital distribution and bargain pricing, OS upgrades are still a disruption for users. Once a year is probably all most people can take.

John Siracusa
John Siracusa has a B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. He has been a Mac user since 1984, a Unix geek since 1993, and is a professional web developer and freelance technology writer. Emailsiracusa@arstechnica.com//Twitter@siracusa